Troubled Thoughts and Nightmares

Every couple of weeks, I do a gig typesetting several pages of an independent arts and culture newspaper. Timelines are tight and content often becomes available in the middle of the night and has to be ready for the early morning, which means getting up in the wee small hours and doing some work.

Tonight is one of those nights.

Mostly, I find this gig pretty fun – the typesetting is right up my alley: intricate and detail-oriented. Sometimes, it feels a bit strange to get up in the middle of the night to work. Today, I had a long and busy day, with over 10 hours of work on various projects. (I'm getting ready to go on holiday at the end of the week, so there is a lot that needs to get done.)

At 9:30 this evening, I had worked through all of the available content for the paper and decided that I would go to bed and have a nap. With the amount of work left to do, I knew I would need to get up around 1:30 am to make my 4:30 am deadline. I find I work better after some sleep than after none.

So I went to bed – I brushed my teeth and followed all of my evening routines. I put the mosquito net over me to protect myself from beautiful July's seedy underbelly and went to sleep.

I woke up at 11:30 pm from the worst nightmare I believe I have ever had in my entire life. I won't go into too many details, but it was set on a magic island and involved a loop of repeated murders, suicides and infanticides. For good measure, sabotaged computer hard drives and giant, dead birds were also prominently featured.

There is no way to combine those things pleasantly — and my nightmare didn't even try.

What's up with that?

I don't usually have nightmares. At all. My dreams are usually extremely lovely, actually: whimsical, weird, funny and definitely comfortable and friendly. I am a frequent dreamer. I usually wake up from my dreams feeling highly amused and/or intrigued by the wonders of my subconscious mind.

This sudden plunge into the horrors feels like a wake up call. It forces me to look at the fact that I've been focusing my mental energy in dark places over the past several months. I've been letting my mind wander a lot of the time and it's been journeying in mostly unhappy and mean territory: thinking about mistakes I've made, feeling resentful about some of my recent experiences, writing imaginary hate mail, listing grievances.

I had been making a good effort to be mindful about how I was thinking over the winter and especially in the first few months of the year. I knew I was struggling with depression and tried to be really conscious about not feeding the beast with malignant thinking. I read a wonderful book by Thich Nhat Hanh which a dear friend gave to me. I was meditating on kindness and forgiveness. I started to see improvements in my mood. But as summer came in, I fell off the mindfulness wagon, right back into my old habits of anger and resentment.

My nightmare tonight felt like a signpost that said: "The high road is over that away. The view is much better over there."

I get the message, loud and clear (it was a very emphatic dream!) I'm getting back on track.

I choose mindfulness and compassion

To adapt a meditation from Thich Nhat Hanh:

Breathing in, I am aware of the memory of my nightmare.
Breathing out, I smile at the memory of my nightmare.
Breathing in, I am aware of my angry feelings.
Breathing out, I smile at my angry feelings.
Breathing in, I am aware of my resentments.
Breathing out, I smile at my resentments.
Breathing in, I am aware of my hurts.
Breathing out, I smile at my hurts.

It's amazing the impact of those four mindful breaths.

This is where I want my brain to be: free to fully appreciate the night sky, the warm summer days, all of the glorious pleasures of being alive, of being present, of letting my heart accept, forgive and be kind.

In closing, I must say thank you to that horrible, horrible nightmare for telling me something very important. Anger and resentment are powerless to make anything better. Especially the past. And the only person I am punishing with my dark thoughts — is me.

Breathing in, I am aware of myself.
Breathing out, I smile at myself.
Breathing in, I am aware of my mind.
Breathing out, I smile at my mind.
Breathing in, I am aware of my heart.
Breathing out, I smile at my heart.

And now, time for another catnap before more content is ready and the typesetting resumes.

Fingers crossed for a dreamless sleep!